Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Greening of Australia

 Although we had very little rain until we got to Cairns, we sure had lots of it on our way back to Adelaide. This rain has really bought the country side alive.  There were lots of crops of winter wheat coming up nicely and as we got further south there were also fields of canola which were just  carpets of yellow.

However these were not the scenes that really struck home. It was all the wild flowers with lots of various colours and especially all the wattle. Sometimes we saw hillsides carpeted in yellow from medium sized shrubs of wattle. We also saw lots of other wild flowers including pink plumbago which in certain places covered a whole paddock. But the variety of colours was what really struck us although we seemed to go through patches of a few wildflowers and then further down the road the combination of flowers would change.


Wattle

 It just shows that not all the wildflowers are in West Australia. We were unable to get to some areas that I know are known for their wildflowers after the rains as it was too wet.


Sturt's Desert Peas

 The desert peas photo was taken on the road to Menindie Lakes where there were quite a few patches of these flowers ,but further down on the road from Broken Hill to Wentworth we saw much larger patches of them. Even areas of saltbush  when you looked closer they were also in flower.


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 Saltbush


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 one of the many daisy type flowers


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 different type ofsaltbush


 more wattle wattle


 ?parasitic vine  close up of vine flowers
 another type of wattle
 Everlasting Daisy? Wattle more daisiespink plumbago


 When we got to the Riverland the flowers changed again of course and we saw lots of these flowers in several different shades of yellow and orange.
Gazania Uniflora
 Gazania Uniflora

 Melaleuca

 The  images and the colours of the wildflowers will stay in our memories even if we had to put up with lots of rain to get such a show .